Art in Revolution 3 - newleafdesign.me.uk

cover design by Alexsandr Vesnin. ‘I have in front of me one of today’s manydisasters: the cover of the new journal Architecture ... a cover designconsisting of solely of letters without any ornamental motifs ... it manifestssuch a monstrous level of banality that it can stand for the whole ideology ofVesnin and those who share his views’.Serious criticism of the Constructivists was coming from other directions. InMay 1922 the influential group AKhRR ‘The Association of Artists ofRevolutionary Russia’ was formed at the time of the forty-seventh exhibitionof the Wanderers who after sixty years were still a force to be reckoned with.AKhRR felt that a large illiterate population needed realist art to assimilatesimple messages and that the new forms of art were failing to convey a directmessage that engaged the public. AKhRR was given an official endorsementwhen the party’s Central Committee encouraged them to go into factoriesand show an idealised view of the workforce in everyday situations. Thisanticipated Heroic Realism, the form of Russian Art that would later come tobe the norm in the Stalinist era.Lenin had been responsible for drawing up a list of sixty-six heroes of therevolution who were suitable to be made into statues or monuments toreplace the Tsars. These included Marx and Engels as well as Spartacus,Dostoevsky and Robespierre. Post-Cubist sculpture of friends of the revolutionwere unpopular due the distortion of their hero’s faces, so an old-fashionedapproach was favoured and popular realistic forms were commissioned. Mostlarge Constructivist sculptures got no further than the drawing board due inequal measure to their limited appeal and to the limited supply of thematerials needed to make them.Dissension from a different kind came from the brothers, Naum Gabo andAnton Pevsner. They had thought Suprematism, with its reliance on puregeometric form and colour, too limiting and decided that their non-objectivesculpture should be more dynamic and that ‘space and time should be thebackbone of the constructive arts’. They were against Marxism, so vehementlyopposed the abolition of pure art and the political belief in materialism thatlead to pure functionalism. Gabo also disliked Cubism and made it knownthat he thought Tatlin’s work showed a chaotic clash of composition andmaterials which derived from this movement. Gabo best exemplifies the sharpdividing line between the spiritual and the materialist which ideologicallyseparated post-Revolutionary art.The ‘godless doctrine of Marxism’ had overnight attempted to replace thebeliefs of a deeply religious country under the Russian Orthodox church. ThePevsner brothers were symptomatic of the artists who disagreed with the ideathat art should be practical, believing that art should remain an experimentaland spiritual activity without any function except to represent a particularvision of the world. Similar views were held by Kandinsky although he wasprepared to work in both camps and Malevich whose feelings about thesematters were deep and ambiguous. Several of his paintings in 1918 feature across which he explained was to signify the death of painting which he wasabout to abandon but he did in fact take up again in his later years. ThePevsner brothers caused a controversy in August 1920 when they posted fivethousand copies of their Realistic Manifesto up in public places. These statedthat art had an absolute and independent value which had a role to performin any society whether it be capitalist or communist. Constructivism’s aim wasA DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 205